My Struggle Against Terrorism

It’s Back — The View from Waldo County

One of our best-liked columnists is returning, after five years! We are delighted to bring you, once again, the View from Waldo County with Lindy Davies.

My Struggle Against “Terror”ism

by Lindy Davies

I am an inveterate do-it-yourselfer, a firm believer in the virtue of creative stubbornness. So, I built my own house, insisting on doing almost everything myself, despite having no idea how to do any of it when I started. Yes, I had to rip out wiring and do it over; I had to install two toilets twice each  but I got it right, finally: I now know how to wire and plumb a home. When family and friends see what I’ve done, they express admiration — a nice rub for my ego. Yet, the question always sort of tickled the back of my mind: what is it, really, that they so admire about this? After all, professional contractors could have built the house more quickly, with better fit-and-finish, and even cheaper, in a sense. I had to pay up front for everything — but all one needs to climb aboard the conventional homeowner train is a modest down payment, and a promise to maintain an acceptably remunerative occupation for… thirty… years… Hmmm.

That’s where the terror starts. There is something to admire in being able to get oneself a comfortable hearth & home, without promising to pay interest and principal for a long, long time. Oh, we gathered a bit of credit-card debt along the way, and we are having a bit of trouble securing homeowners’ insurance — but, yes, thanks: admiration. I’ll accept it.

The next thing folks usually say is something like, “How did you learn to do all that yourself? I could never do that…” Well, I learned, as I said, by means of abject bullheadedness. I read books, got advice, obsessively scoped other buildings in various stages of construction, and — most significantly, screwed things up and did them over. I suppose I do possess an unusual level of stubbornness — but, that’s hard to gauge from inside one’s own bailiwick. It really does seem to me that most people give up a tad too easily. On the phone with my younger sister, flush from hard-won plumbing triumphs, I crowed, “I now know where the sh** goes, and how it gets there!” To which she replied “You and I are SO in a different space right now.”

People make jokes about the high prices plumbers and electricians charge, but in reality they’re happy to pay their prices, because they live in deepest fear. Water and electricity are supposed to come eagerly out of the wall when you summon them, at exactly the right temperature and pressure, not appear anywhere they shouldn’t, and always be perfectly clean and safe. Food, likewise, is supposed to come sanitarily packaged from the supermarket, nutritiously predictable, pluggable into the standard recipes. Let’s not think too much about how it gets there, or… what it actually… is. Our aches and pains are to be expertly diagnosed and remedied by qualified medical professionals. The ability to calculate the amount we must render annually to Caesar is, Lord knows, at least as mysterious and abstruse as the cycles of alternating current or the biochemistry of salmonella. We could not possibly handle that without the merciful dispensations of experts. Even our cars are controlled, nowadays, by computers. Our mechanics don’t listen to the engines anymore; they hook them up to their computers for diagnosis. If Intelligence says Iraq has WMD, and Credentialed Experts repeat it on the network news, who are we to question it? They have experts in the field — we have nothing more than a sense that something sounds fishy. Can passenger jets really knock down the World Trade Center? They said the burning jet fuel melted the steel beams. Some say the temperature of jet fuel burning in air is far lower than the melting point of steel beams, but — how do we know? Are we experts on that? On anything? We have to depend on Experts for everything! Everything! Everything we know and depend on, and we cannot tell whether any one of them is lying: we live in Terror.

And so, because of thoughts like these, I have come to view do-it-yourselfing as more than just a practical way to get things done, more, even, than a satisfying hobby. I’ve come to think of do-it-yourselfing as a spiritual path. If I don’t have to be afraid of the wires in the walls and what they’re carrying, if I can figure out where the sh** goes and how it gets there, then perhaps I can also be less poorly equipped to deal with the bigger questions in life.

It may be relevant to mention, here, that I was raised a Catholic, in a family that was God-fearing, but unfervent. Our spiritual lives were most definitely left in the hands of the experts. We just didn’t know what in the world to do with our sinful natures, but it was OK: the Priest was trained in the art and science of dispensing absolution; he was checked out on the equipment. When I was a child, I thought as a child, etc., and the system worked. As a young adult I rabidly hated the Catholic Church and came up with philosophical euphemera for the overburdened name of “God”. Only much later in life did I come to see the peace and joy to be found in spiritual do-it-yourselfing. Heresies, Apostasies, Blasphemies — well… Who’s to say, really?

It seems to me that society would be far, far better off if schools would foster the spirit of DIY, rather than pretending to train every single kid to join the ranks of Credentialed Experts, all the while knowing damn good and well that most of them won’t make it. But, that’s probably too much to ask, at least at this benighted stage of civilization. At least, we can raise our kids to know the joy of stubbornly trying and learning for themselves.

If we don’t, the terrorists have already won.

August, 2003

Lindy Davies is the Program Director of the Henry George Institute, an organization that encourages and facilitates high-quality DIY thinking in the area of economics!

Lindy Davies is Program Director of the Henry George Institute and Editor of the Georgist Journal. He is the author of The Alodia Scrapbook, the story of a struggling African nation that (in fiction, alas) used Geoism to set itself on the path to prosperity. Recently he has managed a successful campaign to get the HGI's distance-learning program approved by the National College Credit Recommendation Service. He lives in Maine with his wife and two children.

Right on, Lindy Davies. Do it yourself – that’s the very heart and soul of what it means to be an American. If you ask me.

Ask your own questions; get your own answers. Take a skeptical view of credentialists. Get your hands dirty. Try to help your neighbor out, if he’s got a problem. Don’t be too quick to condemn other people’s ideas of morality – stick to your own, because you’ve built them yourself. Right on bro, & Amen.

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Arts & Letters

Geonomics is …

a study of a phenomenon David Ricardo noted going on two centuries ago. When wine grapes rise to $10,000 a ton from the very best land (last year, cabernet sauvignon commanded an average of $4,021 a ton in the Napa Valley), then vineyard prices soar from $18,000 an acre in the 1980′s to $100,000 an acre five years ago and now for a top pedigree up to $300,000 an acre (The New York Times, April 9, via Wyn Achenbaum). Pricey land does not make wine pricey; spendy wine makes land spendy. While vintners make their wine tasty, nature and society in general – not any lone owner – make land desireable. Steve Kerch of CBS’s MarketWatch (April 5) notes that much of what a home sells for on the open market is a reflection of intangible factors such as what school district the house sits in. The price the builder has to pay for the land also tends to be driven by the same intangibles. Because the value of land comes from society, and because one’s use excludes the rest of society, each user owes all others compensation, and is owed compensation by everyone else. Sharing land’s value, instead of taxing one’s efforts, is the policy of geonomics.

one of many words I coined over 20 years ago: geoism, geonomics, geonomy, geocracy, etc – neologisms that later others came up with, too. CNBC once had a Geonomics Show, and Middlebury College has a Geonomics Institute. If “economy” is literally “management of the household”, then geonomy is “management of the planet”. The kind of management I had in mind is not what CNBC was thinking – top-down. My geonomics is not hands-on, interfering, but hands-off, organic. It’d strive to align policy with natural processes, similar to what holistic healing does in medicine, what organic farming does in agriculture. Geonomics attends to two key components: One, the crucial stuff to track is fat — or profit, especially profits without production, such as rent, or all the money we spend on the nature we use. Society’s surplus is the sine qua non for growth, needed to counter death – not merely more, but sustainable development, more from less. Two, the basic process to respect is the feedback loop. These let nature maintain balance automatically and could do the same for markets, if we let them. Letting them would turn our economies, now our masters, into a geonomy, our servant, providing us with prosperity, eco-librium (to coin a term) and leisure, time off — a hostile environment for economan but a cradle for a loving and creative humanity.

an alternative to conventional land trusts. Just as it seems some functions should not be left to the market – private courts and cops invite corruption (while private mediation is fine) – just so some land should not be left in the market. That said, sacred sites do not make much of a model for treating the vast acreage of land that we need to use. So the usual trust model, which is anti-use and counter-market, can not apply where it’s needed most. Trust proponents worry about ownership and control – two very human ambitions – but they’re not central. Supposedly, we the people own millions acres – acres that private corporations treat as private fiefdoms – and conversely, the Nature Conservancy owns wilderness the public can some places use as parks. So, the issue is not who owns but who gets the rent – ideally, all of us.

close to the policy of the Garden Cities in England. Founded by Ebenezer Howard over a century ago, residents own the land in common and run the town as a business. Letchworth, the oldest of the model towns, serves residents grandly from bucketfuls of collected land rent (as does the Canadian Province of Alberta from oil royalty). A geonomic town would pay the rent to residents, letting them freely choose personalized services, and also ax taxes. Both geonomics and Howard were inspired by American proto-geonomist Henry George. The movement launched by Howard today in the UK advances the shift of taxes from buildings to locations. A recent report from the Town and Country Planning Association proposes this Property Tax Shift and their journal published research in the potential of land value taxation by Tony Vickers (Vol. 69, Part 5, 2000). (Thanks to James Robertson)

a scientific look at how we divvy up the work and the wealth, how some of us end up with too much or too little effort or reward. That’s partly due to Ricardo’s Law of Rent, showing how wasteful use of Earth cuts wages. And it’s partly due to how a society’s elite runs government around like water boys, dishing out subsidies and tax breaks. While geonomists look political reality right in the eye, without blinking, conventional economists flinch. When Paul Volcker, ex-chief of the Federal Reserve, moved on to a cushy professorship at Princeton cum book contract, the crush of deadlines bore down. So Volcker asked a junior associate to help with the book. The guy refused, explaining that giving serious consideration to policy would ruin his academic career. The ex-Fed chief couldn’t believe it and asked the department chair if truly that were the case. That head honcho pondered the question then replied no, not if he only does it once. And economics was AKA political economy!

a POV that Spain’s president might try. A few blocks from my room in Madrid at a book fair to promote literacy, Sr Zapatero, while giving autographs and high fives to kids, said books are very expensive and he’d see about getting the value added tax on them cut down to zero. (El Pais, June 4; see, politicians can grasp geo-logic.) But why do we raise the cost of any useful product? Why not tax useless products? Even more basic: is being better than a costly tax good enough? Our favorite replacement for any tax is no tax: instead, run government like a business and charge full market value for the permits it issues, such as everything from corporate charters to emission allowances to resource leases. These pieces of paper are immensely valuable, yet now our steward, the state, gives them away for nearly free, absolutely free in some cases. Government is sitting on its own assets and needs merely to cash in by doing what any rational entity in the economy does – negotiate the best deal. Then with this profit, rather than fund more waste, pay the stakeholders, we citizenry, a dividend. Thereby geonomics gets rid of two huge problems. It replaces taxes with full-value fees and replaces subsidies for special interests with a Citizens Dividend for people in general. Neither left nor right, this reform is what both nature lovers and liberty lovers need to promote, right now.

the policy that the earth’s natural patterns suggests. Use the eco-system’s self-regulating feedback loops as a model. What then needs changing? Basically, the flow of money spent to own or use Earth (both sites and resources) must visit each of us. Our agent, government, exists to collect this natural rent via fees and to disburse the collected revenue via dividends. Doing this, we could forgo taxes on homes and earnings and subsidies of either the needy or the greedy. For more, see our web site, our pamphlet of the title above, or any of our other lit pieces; ask for our literature list.

a way to have everybody pulling on the same end of the rope. Last summer’s expansive forest fires shed light on growing class resentment in the West. Old loggers and ranchers rankled at the new urgency to stamp out the blazes that threatened the recent Aspenesque settlers. The newcomers expected working class firemen to make protecting their expensive homes top priority. (Chr Sci Mntr, Spt 7) The tinder for this envy? Rich people moving in bid up the price of land, making it hard to afford by people on the margin. The fault really lies with our system of privatizing land value. If this rising value were collected by land dues and shared by rent dividends – the essence of geonomic policy – who’d complain? The more people move in, the higher the land value, and the fatter the dividend paid to residents. Then people on the margin might go out of their way to invite rich outsiders in.

an economic policy based on the earth’s natural patterns. Eco-systems self-regulate by using feedback loops to keep balance. Can economies do likewise? Why don’t they now produce efficiently and distribute fairly? The answers lie in the money we spend on the earth we use. To attain people/planet harmony, that financial flow from sites and resources must visit each of us. Our agent, government, must collect this natural rent via fees and disburse the collected revenue via dividends. And, it must forgo taxes on homes and earnings, and quit subsidies of either the needy or the greedy. As our steward, government must also collect Ecology Security Deposits, require Restoration Insurance, and auction off the occasional Emissions Permit. And that’s about it – were nature our model.

a discipline that, compared to economics, is as obscure as Warren Buffett’s investment strategy, compared to conventional investment theory, about which Buffett said, “You couldn’t advance in a finance department in this country unless you taught that the world was flat.” (The New York Times, Oct 29). The writer wondered, “But why? If it works, why don’t more investors use it?”
Good question. Geonomics works, too. Every place that has used it has prospered while conserving resources. Yet it remains off the radar of many wanna-be reformers. Gradually, tho’, that’s changing. More are becoming aware of what geonomics studies – all the money we spend on the nature we use. Geonomics (1) as an alternative worldview to the anthropocentric, sees human economies as part of the embracing ecosystem with natural feedback loops seeking balance in both systems. (2) As an alternative to worker vs. investor, it sees our need for sites and resources making those who own land into landlords. (3)As an alternative to economics, it tracks the trillions of “rent” as it drives the “housing” bubble and all other indicators. And (4) as an alternative to left or right, it suggests we not tax ourselves then subsidize our favorites but recover and share society’s surplus, paying in land dues and getting back “rent” dividends, a la Alaska’s oil dividend. Letting rent go to the wrong pockets wreaks havoc, while redirecting it to everyone would solve our economic ills and the ills downstream from them.
People must learn to stop whining so much and feel enough self-esteem to demand a fair share of rent, society’s surplus, the commonwealth.